Higher Education for All

"In the late 1950s, California embarked on an ambitious attempt to provide free public higher education to all high school graduates. This massive expansion of higher education in what would soon be the nation's most populous state coincided with the arrival of the counterculture on campus, a surge of organizing around ethnic studies and affirmative action programs, and the rise of the New Right, with Ronald Reagan as governor. As Andrew Stone Higgins details, this collision was no coincidence-the tension between the democratic promise of the California Master Plan for Education and the structural injustices it inadvertently reinforced ended up catalyzing the tumultuous politics of the 1960s, including both progressive campus movements and conservative backlash"--